Who Owns Confucius, Inc.?

I attended a birthday party in Beijing yesterday for Confucius. It was his two thousand five hundred and sixty-second birthday, and the Confucius Temple was spruced up for the occasion with a red carpet and a corps of children chanting his words in unison. Members of the local government and descendants of the sage took turns at an altar in his honor. The birthday boy has been dead since 479 B.C., but one wouldn’t necessarily know that from the sign outside: this was the “second annual” birthday party at the Confucius Temple. For reasons that I’ll be exploring in greater detail later, Confucius is back—with gusto—and honoring his birthday is a relatively recent fashion in Beijing, where political leaders are keen to nuzzle up against Confucius’s positive image.

That may explain why Chinese authorities—not always celebrated for dedication to trademark protection—have moved with unusual efficiency to clarify who has the right to use Confucius’s name. As Shanghaiist reports today, the Ministry of Culture has made life difficult for organizers of China’s “Confucius Peace Prize,” a hastily arranged alternative to the Nobel, which Chinese patriots organized last year after the Nobel Peace Prize was given to the imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo. The Ministry has reportedly told organizers—the China Native Art Association’s Traditional Culture Protection Bureau—to shut down the whole affair. Adding to the confusion, however, other Chinese press reports suggest that, like the new birthday party, the second annual Confucius Peace Prize will go on anyway, with new sponsors.

So far eight nominees have been put forward: the Chinese-government-backed Panchen Lama Gyaltsen Norbu (not to be confused with the Lama that Tibet exiles claim); the agricultural pioneer Yuan Longping; the Taiwanese politician James Soong; as well as some more internationally familiar names: Vladimir Putin; South African President Jacob Zuma; Kofi Annan, Angela Merkel, and Bill Gates.